Elizabeth Bowen wrote of her prose, â€˜I want the rhythm to jerk or jarâ€”toan extent, even, which may displease the readerâ€™. Her fictions rejoice in,yet also chafe at the impossibility of, a language that never quite getsyou where you think you should be going â€“she is, amongst many otherthings, the master of the bad car ride. She also revels in ghosts, houses,furniture and mad, or at least maddening, little girls. Initiallyneglected, recent Bowen scholarship has emphasized the richness and depthof her work. With a fictional universe poised somewhere on a knifeâ€™s edgebetween the worlds of Jane Austen and Samuel Beckett, her novels, shortstories, letters and critical writings invite more critical attention.Modernist and anti-modernist; uncompromising observer of womenâ€™s relationswith each other and professed anti-feminist; invested in her Anglo-Irishheritage while unsparingly marking its demise, Bowenâ€™s work, is as sheonce said of E.M. Forsterâ€™s â€˜revolutionary in a manner impossible to pindownâ€™.

We invite short (250 word) abstracts for short (15 minute) papers on anyaspect of Bowenâ€™s work to form part of this one-day colloquium. Pleasesend them to p.thurschwell_at_sussex.ac.uk or Pam Thurschwell, EnglishDepartment, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QN by 1 December2008.

*This is how Bowen describes relations between the Irish and the Englishin The House in Paris.